Yesterday during AMD's Q2'06 earnings conference call, AMD's
President and Chief Operating Officer Dirk Meyer recapped the long term plans
for the company. Although the bulk of his comments were already stated in
during the June AMD
Analyst's Day, Meyer also added the tidbit that the company plans "to
demonstration our next-generation processor core, in a native quad-core
implementation, before the end of the year." Earlier this year, AMD's Executive Vice President Henri Richard claimed this native-quad core processor would be called K8L.

Earlier AMD roadmaps have revealed that quad-core production CPUs would not
utilize a native quad-core design until late 2007 or 2008. To
put that into perspective AMD demonstrated the first dual-core Opteron samples
in August 2004, with the processor tape out in June 2004. The official launch
of dual-core Opteron occurred on April 21, 2005. On the same call Meyer
announced that that the native quad-core would launch in the middle of 2007 -- suggesting the non-native quad-core Deerhound designs may come earlier than expected or not at all.

"If you look at the last five years, if you look at what major innovations have occurred in computing technology, every single one of them came from AMD. Not a single innovation came from Intel." -- AMD CEO Hector Ruiz in 2007